This is for those of you who know that you're highly competent, but your communication is not creating the level of authority you know that you've earned.
Welcome back to Speak Up, the number one ranked business communication podcast, where we help high performing introvert leaders including you, social introverts turn your ideas into influence and improve business outcomes.
Because being brilliant does not automatically make you influential.
I am your host, Laura Camacho, your career accelerator, executive presence strategist and godmother.
In this short episode, you will discover why brilliant senior leaders suddenly feel ineffective in high-level executive meetings.
The subtle communication habits that quietly weaken authority.
And how to stop over explaining and start commanding attention when you speak.
This is the situation I'm talking about.
You're experienced, you're thoughtful, you know your material and yet sometimes you start speaking in an executive meeting and you literally feel the energy.
Leave the room.
You've probably spent most of your career being seen as an excellent leader, excellent communicator.
And then suddenly it seems like your instincts stop working and you're explaining something and you add context.
You had clarity.
You walk people through your thinking.
And then you feel it.
You feel those eyes glaze over.
The people stop engaging.
The energy drop.
I mean, I felt it too.
You can literally feel it.
To me, it's like the temperature just plummets.
Anyway, yes, it's something that you do experience in real time.
And so, instead of being fully present, you start becoming hyper aware of yourself and you start this self-monitoring spiral.
Where you're asking yourself as you are speaking, wait, am I rambling?
Is that too much?
Do I sound unsure?
Should I stop?
Did I lose them?
And then once that starts happening, you're really no longer fully there in the conversation.
And people feel that.
So the ones who were paying attention also start getting distracted.
You don't want your attention divided between delivering your message and monitoring yourself.
You need to be fully there.
Ironically for many high achievers, the harder they tried to solve this problem, the worse it gets.
So they're listening to podcasts and reading books and asking for feedback and rehearsing conversations and practicing with ChatGPT and then replaying meetings afterwards.
Because Face it.
You guys listening, you are the ones who do this kind of thing because you're highly conscientious.
But if you are getting all these inputs from different sources, it's really hard to implement something and it's really hard to know like, where to start.
Even if usually you're articulate thoughtful, smart and prepared, this can be extremely frustrating for you.
And I'm going to let you know why this happens.
And you're not alone.
Okay.
And it was a client who gave me the terminology.
He says, every level of leadership has its own communication operating system.
That's it.
So, earlier in your career, being detailed helped you, being thorough helped you.
Explaining your reasoning is what built trust, showing your work, demonstrated competence and you got rewarded for your preparation expertise precision, and that's probably why you are successful.
But once you get to a certain level, It can start at director or it can start higher.
It depends on the size of the company and the culture.
But executive environments process information differently.
Senior leaders are extremely overloaded.
They move fast.
They have limited bandwidth.
So they're listening for relevance, judgment, clarity, confidence, strategic direction.
They don't want a detailed walkthrough.
And this is where high performers accidentally lose the room, because the more intelligent and conscientious you are, like you have both of those qualities.
That makes you more likely to over explain because you want the nuance.
You want the accuracy.
You want people to fully understand, but that can be interpreted by lack of clarity, lack of priority or lack of confidence, regardless of your contribution to the company thus far.
So over time, this is expensive, right?
Because you're going to start speaking less decisively.
You're going to start over preparing for meetings, replaying those conversations afterwards and holding back ideas.
So eventually, you stop sounding like you trust yourself.
And even though you're the same incredibly capable person that you've always been.
Meanwhile you see other leaders building authority because they get to the point.
They just say the thing, even if they're not as competent, but they are clear.
Executive environments reward clarity of signal.
You've really got to hone it down.
So you may be thinking, well, maybe I just should prepare more.
And I really don't think that's the problem.
I think you should prepare more.
I think it's a filtering problem, or as I mentioned in a recent episode, curating.
Your job is to curate, to filter, not explain everything, and you're just not filtering enough.
And that can cause you to think, oh, well, maybe I'm just not a natural executive.
Well, that's completely false.
It's all learned skills.
Granted, it is easier for some people than others, but you're the conscientious, hard worker, high performer.
So of course you can do this.
It's not about becoming robotic or dominating the meetings or being aggressive.
It's not about being someone else.
It's really about...
Developing your sense of how senior executives process information and understanding the pressures that they're on, and stop analyzing yourself while you're trying to talk to them.
That's why trying harder can make executive presence worse.
So here's your breakthrough.
This is the thing.
When you stop trying to sound impressive and you start tuning in to what executives are listening for.
That is your ticket.
That allows you to enter the conversations at that strategic level.
It allows you to simplify without dumbing things down.
It allows you to speak about outcomes, impacts rather than process.
That will stop you from over explaining.
You need to be comfortable with silence and you need to be decisive without sounding aggressive.
So when you do that, that's when you own the room.
It feels different.
People lean in, you stop chasing the validation.
Everybody's looking to you, right?
That's a different skillset.
So if you've ever walked out of a meeting replaying every word you said and if you've ever felt yourself analyzing yourself while you're talking right.
Who does that?
Well, only really smart, highly conscientious people do that.
But it's not helping you.
I want you to learn the executive communication patterns, Or you could think of them as codes that nobody teaches you, even in classes.
They'll give you some general ideas, but not like we get it here.
The Speak Up, Develop Your Executive Presence podcast.
This is how I help leaders inside of the executive presence mastery system.
I help high-performing executives communicate with clarity authority, confidence in the rooms that matter the most.
No need to second-guess yourself when you know what to look for and what to speak to.
If they're interested in exploring this option, go to the show notes, click the link at the top and let's talk about it.
I know that you can be the kind of leader whose presence changes the room instead of disappearing inside of it.
And one more thing, different topic, but Speak Up Summer Camp waitlist ends this week on Saturday.
So, if you are interested in getting that juicy discount, which will be announced next week, and this highly affordable less than 100 discount summer camp that starts July 6,
Get on the summer camp waitlist.
The link is also in the show notes.
Have a fantastic day and I will catch you on the next episode.
